Daily Caller lashes out at Washington Post on Menendez saga

New media in D.C. launched the “scandal.” But Washington’s old media is busy knocking it down.

When it comes to allegations that Sen. Robert Menendez visited prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, The Daily Caller and The Washington Post are reporting very different versions of what happened — or didn’t.

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Menendez denies ‘smears’

On Friday, The Post reported a local lawyer told Dominican investigators that a man who claimed to work for The Daily Caller said he had been offered $5,000 to find women who would lie and say they had sex for money with Menendez.

And this wasn’t the first time the Post has published a story that tries to undercut The Daily Caller’s reporting that a top campaign donor provided prostitutes to the New Jersey Democrat while he visited the Dominican Republic, a story that first hit in November 2012, when the Daily Caller released a video of two women alleging that they had been paid for sex with Menendez earlier that year.

Fast forward to February of this year: The Post reported that the FBI had been investigating allegations that the senator had patronized prostitutes but found no evidence to date to support the claim. A few weeks later, the Post published a piece stating that a Dominican prostitute who appeared on a video claiming Menendez paid her for sex said she was actually paid to make up the claims.

The Post initially reported the woman was one whom The Daily Caller had interviewed for its original story, but the paper later revised its story to remove that claim. For its part, the Daily Caller pushed back strongly against the report, saying the woman in The Post’s report wasn’t one of the two women it had interviewed last November. “The Washington Post mistook one prostitute for another,” The Daily Caller wrote.

And now The Daily Caller’s editor, Tucker Carlson, said he’s had enough.

The Post’s reporting, he says, has been “amateurish” and “embarrassing.”

“I have no idea what the Post’s motives might be,” he wrote to POLITICO in an email. “Their reporting on the Menendez story has been amateurish. The breathless piece they ran a few weeks ago about the deposition that one of the prostitutes supposedly signed turned out to be ridiculous. Once we got a copy of the deposition, we found it never ever mentioned The Daily Caller. To this day we haven’t been able to find or identify the woman who signed it. She has never surfaced or made any sort of public comment. Does she exist? No clue. The Post doesn’t know either, which makes you wonder why they ran the story in the first place.”

“It was entirely appropriate for The Post to report public statements made by the district attorney who is investigating this matter,” Coratti wrote in a statement to POLITICO. “The article reported the allegations neutrally and without assuming their truth, and included the responses of The Daily Caller and Mr. Carlson.”